Setback for Vodafone: German court clears antitrust office to rule in 1&1 network case

The Higher Regional Court in Düsseldorf has thrown out Vodafone's emergency motion to have Germany's Federal Cartel Office removed from the market-abuse case brought over rival 1&1's slow network build-out. The authority can now issue its decision — a setback Vodafone says it will fight in court if the outcome is negative. 1&1 welcomed the ruling; its own antennas now reach roughly a third of German households.

Key Takeaways

The Higher Regional Court in Düsseldorf has thrown out Vodafone's emergency motion to have Germany's Federal Cartel Office removed from the market-abuse case brought over rival 1&1's slow network build-out.
The authority can now issue its decision — a setback Vodafone says it will fight in court if the outcome is negative.
1&1 welcomed the ruling; its own antennas now reach roughly a third of German households.

AI synthesis4 sources7

Vodafone has suffered a setback in its legal fight with rival 1&1 over the build-out of 1&1's mobile network. The Higher Regional Court (OLG) in Düsseldorf has rejected the company's urgent application to have Germany's Federal Cartel Office (Bundeskartellamt) declared biased in the ongoing market-abuse proceedings against it. The authority is now free to issue a decision in the case — precisely the outcome Vodafone had hoped to prevent.

The conflict dates back to 2019, when 1&1 first acquired its own mobile spectrum and began building a network to compete with Deutsche Telekom, O2 and Vodafone. The rollout started painfully slowly: in early 2023 the Montabaur-based company was operating just five of the 1,000 sites required of it. 1&1 blamed Vantage Towers — Vodafone's former tower unit, in which Vodafone remains the largest shareholder — for providing far fewer sites than contractually agreed. The company suspected Vodafone of influencing Vantage Towers to slow a competitor's network build-out; both firms denied this. The cartel office opened an abuse-of-dominance case in 2023, and in spring 2025 its president, Andreas Mundt, said the delayed provision of sites amounted to an anticompetitive obstruction of 1&1.

Vodafone then went to court last autumn, seeking what is known as preventive legal protection: it wanted the authority removed from the case for bias before any final ruling. The OLG Düsseldorf rejected the emergency motion. A Vodafone spokesman stressed that the question of bias had not been finally decided — the court had only refused the fast-track route of clarifying the issue ahead of the authority's decision. "We continue to believe that the Bundeskartellamt has violated essential procedural rules," the spokesman said, adding that the authority had acted with clear bias in favor of 1&1 throughout the proceedings, as Vodafone's files showed. The procedural violations alone would make any decision unlawful, he argued, and if the outcome is negative Vodafone will take all necessary legal steps. The cartel office firmly rejects the accusations.

1&1 welcomed the ruling. "We welcome the fact that the cartel office can continue its work and now decide the case," the company said. Its network rollout has meanwhile gathered pace: by the end of the second quarter of 2026, 1&1's antennas reached almost a third of German households. Where its own network is unavailable — the remaining two-thirds — 1&1 customers are served over the Vodafone network under a partnership the two carriers struck despite their legal dispute, with 1&1 paying rent for access.